Author: azeeadmin

One of the most strategically important financial relationships for neobanks is becoming the account destination for a user’s paycheck. If you’re a bank and you own that specific relationship, users will increasingly use that account for everything from daily spending to saving (after all, that’s where their money is going). That activity in turn leads to expansive opportunities to upsell users to other financial products and generate the kinds of fees that banks love to make.

It just so happens though that users are often baffled in how to change their direct deposit instructions. To do so, they still have to go into ancient payroll systems, fill out account and routing data, verify that it’s correctly setup and more — all steps that can fluster users who will just give up.

Pinwheel is a “payroll connectivity” API designed to bridge this divide. It helps neobanks and other clients connect into a users’s payroll information system, offering everything from direct-deposit switching to income verification (a hot space these days), and paycheck-linked lending.

It’s proven very popular, particularly in the midst of the pandemic that saw millions switch jobs as well as neobanks reaching stratospheric growth as account holders searched for cheaper and more flexible banking options. The company saw 11x revenue growth last quarter and claims neobank Current and mobile payment service Square Cash as clients.

That early traction has drawn a new round of capital. Michael Gilroy of Coatue led a $20 million Series A round into the company. Gilroy, who came to Coatue about two years ago from Canaan, has long been interested in fintech, recently investing in companies like B2B receivables platform Melio, financial transaction API Quanto, and teenage neobank Step.

In addition to Coatue, Primary Ventures and Semper Virens newly joined the round, and seed investors First Round Capital and Upfront Ventures re-joined as well.

We last profiled Pinwheel a year ago with its $7 million seed round, exploring how the founders migrated from offering payroll benefits to solving the more fundamental problem of payroll connectivity. Co-founder Curtis Lee, who was then executive chairman and also a venture partner at Primary Ventures, has since moved full-time to become chairman and president of the startup. He said that the company has doubled down particularly on direct-deposit switching as a gateway to the rest of its API offerings.

“For us, it was really about picking one of those and using it as a wedge and then augmenting from there,” Lee said. “Direct-deposit switching was the most urgent and top priority for all of our customers, mostly since there wasn’t much of an alternative.” According to him, the company is becoming a market leader in that strategic niche. “In a quarter, we will be doing close to half of all direct-deposit switches in the neobank market,” he said.

Pinwheel co-founders Anish Basu (CTO), Curtis Lee (chairman and president) and Kurt Lin (CEO). Image Credits: Pinwheel

Once a client starts with direct deposits they start to migrate to other offerings like paycheck-linked lending. As low-fee neobanks build up their consumer bases, they are frantically seeking revenue streams to cover their massive growth. Lending is one rich target, and having direct access to payroll data can make it significantly easier to underwrite a loan.

Pinwheel has been aggressively growing its team, expanding from a small coterie a year ago to about 40 people. The company is reopening its office today in the Flatiron District in New York City, and Lee noted that the company is “remote-friendly” and has about a third of its staff outside the NYC metro.

Among notable hires, Lauren Crossett, formerly of Plaid and Quovo, has joined the company as head of commercial. The company has also signed a VP of Engineering, who will join in the next few weeks.

In addition to the institutional funds, a litany of individual investors joined the round, including Gokul Rajaram, Adam Nash, Jackie Reses, Raj Date, Tony Xu, Shishir Mehotra, Amit Agarwal and Shiva Rajaraman.

Spotify today is expanding its investment in personalization features with the launch of dedicated in-app experience called Only You, which focuses on your favorite music and how you listen. The experience is similar to Spotify’s popular annual review, Spotify Wrapped, as it highlights the artists, songs, genres and other aspects of your music listening experience that are important to you, which can then be shared across social media, just as Wrapped is. The company is also today debuting Blend, a new way to create a personalized playlist with a friend.

The Only You hub will live alongside the existing Made for You hub on the Search page inside the Spotify app. In Made for You, you’ll find your other personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Daily Mixes, and others, liek Your Time Capsule or Summer Rewind, for example, as well as the more recently added trio of playlist sets, Spotify Mixes.

From now through the end of the month, Only You will be a separate hub in the Spotify app, but it will ultimately be relocated to live inside the Made for You hub.

Image Credits: Spotify

The new Only You experience, meanwhile, will help you discover new trends beyond what you might see in your personalized playlists. This includes “Your Audio Birth Chart,” where the Sun is the top artist you listened to over the last 6 months, Rising is your most recent discovery, and the Moon is an artist you listen to that shows your emotional side; “Your Dream Dinner Party,” where you pick 3 favorite artists for a custom, frequently updated Spotify Mix featuring favorite songs and fresh picks; and “Your Artist Pairs,” which features unique pairings you’ve listened to recently, like those spanning genres.

It will also contain other personalized insights like the different time periods of music you’ve enjoyed, the music or podcasts you listen to at what time of day, and your favorite music genres and podcast topics.

For example, your “Song Year” will show how you’ve traveled through different periods of time, based on the tracks you listened to throughout the year. The first year that will pop up here is the year you’ve streamed the most, while the second year that appears will represent the earlier release year that you’ve listened to. The third year is the most recent song year that’s been streamed.

To gather all this data, Only You looks at your Spotify in-app listening experience over the last 6 months (Dec. 2020 – May 2021). Users must have streamed 30 tracks across 5 different artists over the past 6 months in order to be eligible for the new experience. Spotify says the data isn’t being used for ad targeting purposes. (And despite astrology’s connection to birth months and years, the “Your Audio Birth Chart” isn’t asking for users’ birth year to create this experience.)

Image Credits: Spotify

Another key part of the Only You campaign is the launch of Blend, currently in beta.

This feature will sit on the “Made for Two” shelf within the Only You hub, allowing you to invite any other Spotify user to create a playlist with you. Using similar mixing technology that powers Spotify’s Family Mix and Duo Mix in their respective plans, Blend lets you invite any other Spotify user (free user or paid subscriber) to merge their musical tastes with yours to create a curated playlist featuring songs you both like.

This playlist is updated daily and will grow with users over time as their listening habits change, Spotify says.

Because it works with free accounts, Blend could encourage more users to try Spotify so they can create a playlist with a significant other, best friend, family member or others, even if they’re not on a shared plan.

Image Credits: Spotify

Both the Only You experience and Blend build on technology Spotify had already developed to power other features, like Wrapped and various multi-user blended mixes, rather than creating something entirely new. But the bigger message Spotify wants to convey here is that it’s far ahead of competitors when it comes to personalization features. Even if rivals are duping its playlists, it wants to be the forerunner when it comes to personalized music.

Of course, that’s not always the case. The newer Spotify Mixes, for instance, were a lot like a feature Pandora had launched years prior, which created custom playlists across a number of attributes, including genre and mood. But where Spotify succeeds is its continual release of new personalization features, as it works to make its app customized to the end user. By doing so, the switching costs increase — that is, users will find it harder to jump to rival services due to how many custom playlists they may have on hand.

Spotify will begin heavily marketing the launch of Only You with a number top artists by creating sets of stats for various fandoms, including those for Harry Styles, Selena Gomez, Lil Nas X, Doja Cat, Justin Bieber, SZA and others. The campaign will run through June 30.

As consumers around the world slowly start to get moving again — and fingers crossed that new waves of Covid-19 cases do not set that back — one of the big players in on-demand mass transportation services is announcing a growth round to move with them. FlixMobility, the parent company of the FlixBus coach network and the FlixTrain rail service, has closed more than $650 million in a Series G round of funding that values the Munich-based company at over $3 billion.

Jochen Engert, who co-founded and co-leads the company with André Schwämmlein, described the round in a press call earlier today as a “balanced” mix of equity and debt, and said that the plan will be to use the funds to both expand its network in the U.S. market as well as across Europe.

New backer Canyon Partners, existing investors General Atlantic, Permira, TCV, HV Capital, Blackrock, Baillie Gifford and SilverLake, and the founders all participated in this round, which was oversubscribed, the company said, perhaps one reason why it’s not putting an exact figure on it since it could grow; the other reason is that, with debt, typically companies can easily borrow more if needed.

The size of the round and the raised valuation — it’s gone up by $1 billion since FlixMobility last raised in 2019 — are bold signs of how FlixMobility is coming out of the pandemic swinging, with investors backing its ambitions. Like others in the transportation and tourism industries, FlixMobility saw business essentially grind to a halt last year, putting it into a holding pattern to await brighter days. It’s telling that the figures it provides on its size — 62 million passengers traveled with the company in 2019 — predate the pandemic.

“The COVID-19 [pandemic] has been the most tremendous, the most challenging time for any mobility company,” said Schwämmlein in a conversation with journalists, “and obviously this also affected our business very heavily.” The company put safety measures in place, and even expanded some routes in select countries like Portugal and the UK, but mainly had to reduce or completely stop services in the last year. “We can be very proud on what we have delivered to our customers,” he added.

However, he continued that the company has been trying to focus instead on “the famous light at the end of the tunnel.”

“We see the pandemic situation is improving, vaccinations are picking up more and more, and it’s time for us to switch back to offense,” he continued. “The US is leading at the moment we are already above pre-COVID numbers in bookings in the U.S., EU and on the whole, European markets are picking up now following with a delay of one to two months. Therefore we are very optimistic on a travel and mobility rebounded summer effects nations proceed well.”

Pierre Gourdain, MD of FlixBus USA said that the company is aiming to add more buses to its U.S. fleet and expects that by July 4 it will be bigger than FlixBus was pre-pandemic in the country.

What’s less clear is what shape the new FlixBus will take. The company, back in 2019, talked about how its network — which some have described as the “Uber” for busses and trains, in that FlixMobility itself does not own the vehicles that run under its services, served some 29 countries and worked with 300 independent bus and train partners, creating some 350,000 daily connections to more than 2,000 destinations. With some of those partners inevitably disappearing in the last year, one big question will be whether FlixMobility, now armed with lots of debt capital, will be trying to take a firmer role in operating vehicles, alongside its primary objective of filling spaces on them.

More to come.

Amazon in brief blog post announced it will no longer include marijuana on its drug screening program. In short, the company is now treating weed like alcohol, which means off-work employees can partake in a beer or a spliff without fear of repercussions. Of course, just like with alcohol, Amazon says it will continue to do impairment checks and screen for drugs after on-the-job incidents. 

The only exception mentioned involves positions regulated by the Department of Transportation — read: truck drivers and heavy equipment operators. Applicants for those jobs will still be screened for the marijuana. 

This change comes as America is quickly warming to federal legalization of cannabis. Voters across the country, including conservative strongholds, are increasing passing measures granting citizens access to the plant. From medical to recreational use, America is waking up to legal pot and Amazon doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of history.

Amazon, in its statement written by Dave Clark, CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon, acknowledges the changing political landscape, which is opening doors to legal weed and criminal expungement.

And because we know that this issue is bigger than Amazon, our public policy team will be actively supporting The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021 (MORE Act)—federal legislation that would legalize marijuana at the federal level, expunge criminal records, and invest in impacted communities. We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law.

This updated policy is one of the latest steps Amazon is making as its workforce is drawing closer to unionization.

Guild Education, which pairs employees with employer-sponsored learning opportunities, has raised $150 million in a Series E round. The financing event, funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Cowboy Ventures, D1, Emerson Collective, General Catalyst, GSV, Harrison Metal, ICONIQ, Redpoint, and Salesforce Ventures, values the company at $3.75 billion.

With the money, Guild plans to grow its coaching team, expand its learning marketplaces with more short-term certificate opportunities, and double down on its outreach with historically Black colleges and universities. The cash comes at a time where lifelong learning – the concept that students learn and up-skill beyond early adulthood – is becoming more mainstream of a concept in edtech.

But Guild CEO and co-founder Rachel Carlson, who started the company in 2015 with classmate Brittany Stitch, warned that lifelong learning post-pandemic isn’t a simple goal.

“I’m sort of tone deaf to the buzz because I think there are just cyclical, weird spins that happen in Silicon Valley tied to attention span on big critical issues like health care, climate and education,” she said. “But the challenge is, and I even hesitate to call it an opportunity because it’s really more of the problem, is insane.”

Carlson estimates that there will be 3 million cashiers out of work, 2.5 million women who dropped out of work, and 3 million baby boomers who dropped out before retirement age because of lack of skills. Factoring in other disadvantaged populations such as low-income students or rural communities, the founder thinks that the “buzz” around lifelong learning isn’t solving its core issue.

“I’m really worried that America needs to wake up to the problem,” she said.

Guild works with three different stakeholders: employees, employers, and colleges. The up-skilling platform partners with large employers, such as Walmart, Chipotle and The Walt Disney Company, as well low-cost universities, bootcamps, and learning providers. Then, it offers a marketplace for students to choose content, giving them optionality to pick which skills will best prepare them for the future.

Guild’s landing page for Walmart advertises the low-cost of school for working adults, emphasizing the company’s education benefit and possible impact it can have on career trajectory. In Walmart’s case, the workers are asked to make a $365 annual contribution toward tuition, or pay $1 a day. At Chipotle, another Guild customer, 100% of tuition is covered by the employer.

A platform like Guild helps employers keep talent in the pipeline and offer a solid benefit: paid education for their employees. The startup connects employers with these learning providers, and then takes a cut of tuition revenue as its core business model.

While Carlson declined to share revenue or profitability, she did confirm that Guild has more than doubled its revenue since COVID began last March. She estimates that over 4 million Americans have access to the Guild through their employer.

The up-skilling world is crowded, with platforms like Udemy, Coursera, Degreed and others all competing to help students get better employment opportunities. Guild sits in a niche spot, by helping those employed, stay employed. Or as Carlson puts it, taking people out of today’s job, for tomorrow’s job.

While the competition is steep, the co-founder thinks their angle prepares them well for the lifelong learning movement and changing tides of employment in the country,

“The data that’s flowing through our pipes is helping us have a more robust picture of the working adult learner than anyone else in the country,” she said. “We have more of a robust picture about the data that sits on both the education and the employment side of the aisle.”

Celonis, the late stage process mining software startup, announced a $1 billion Series D investment this morning on an eye-popping $11 billion valuation, up from $2.5 billion in its Series C in 2019, quadrupling its value in just two years.

Durable Capital Partners LP and T. Rowe Price Associates co-led the round with participation from new investors Franklin Templeton, Splunk Ventures and existing investors Arena Holdings. Other unnamed existing investors also participated.

While it was at it, the company announced it was naming experienced financial pro Carlos Kirjner as CFO. Kirjner’s most recent job was at Google where he led finance for ads and other key product areas, according to the company.

The presence of institutional investors like T. Rowe Price and Franklin Templeton and the huge influx of capital could be a signal that this is the last private fund raise for the company before it goes public, and Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke did not shy away from IPO talk when asked about it.

“It could be, yeah. It’s kind of tough to predict the future, but look we’re very bullish about the growth and our prospects both as a private — and down the road — a public company, and obviously we now have backers that can invest capital in both [public and private markets],” Rinke told TechCrunch.

Rinke says what’s driving this interest is the tremendous potential of the market even beyond process mining, which he sees as just a starting point for a much larger market. “Process mining where we originated from is really just the gateway to build new processes and better processes for organizations, and as you think about that that’s a much much bigger market that we’re addressing,” he said.

The company’s processing mining software sits at the beginning of the process automation food chain, which includes robotic process automation, no-code workflow and other tools to bring more automated workflows to companies. It’s quite possible that the company could develop other pieces of this or use the new capital to buy talent and functionality, something that Rinke acknowledges is possible now with this much capital behind the company.

Celonis started out by mapping out exactly how work flows through an organization, something that used to take high-priced human consultants months to figure out sitting with employees and watching how work flows. Once a company knows how work moves through an organization, it’s easier to find inefficiencies and places that are ripe for using automation tools. Speeding up that first part of the operation with technology can bring down the cost and accelerate innovation and change.

The company made a huge deal with IBM recently where IBM plans on training 10,000 consultants worldwide to use Celonis tooling. That brings the power of a company the size of IBM to one that is still relatively small in comparison — Rinke thinks they’ll reach 2000 employees by year end — and that could be at least part of the reason investors were willing to pump so much capital into the company.

The company, which recently turned 10, currently has 1000 enterprise customers including Uber, Dell, Splunk (which is also an investor), L’Oreal and AstraZeneca.

Kabuto, the French startup that designs and sells smart suitcases, is releasing a new suitcase today. Called the Kabuto Trunk, this is the company’s biggest suitcase to date. Unlike smart suitcases from other brands, this isn’t just a suitcase with a battery in it.

In particular, there’s a fingerprint reader located at the top of the suitcase. You can save up to 10 different fingerprints. After that, it works pretty much like a fingerprint reader on a smartphone — you put your finger on the reader and it unlocks your suitcase.

In that case, it unlocks the zippers. If somebody else is using your suitcase or the battery is dead, you can also open the suitcase with a traditional key.

The Kabuto Trunk features a hard-shell design with a capacity of 95 liters. It has metal bearing wheels and real tires. Users can choose between two batteries — a 10,000mAh battery and a bigger 20,000mAh battery. Basically you have to choose between weight and battery capacity as bigger batteries tend to be heavier.

Customers can also choose to buy a backpack that magnetically attaches to the suitcase. Designed with travel in mind, that backpack is expandable and can double in thickness from 9 liters to 18 liters.

Image Credits: Kabuto

The suitcase currently costs $629 and the backpack $299 — the company plans to raise prices once the Kickstarter campaign is over.

As always with Kabuto products, this isn’t a product for everyone. They tend to be more expensive than what you’d normally pay for a suitcase. But some people like to pack things in a very specific way so that important items remain available. The startup has previously raised $1 million (€900,000) from Frédéric Mazzella, Michel & Augustin, Bpifrance, Fabien Pierlot and others.

Image Credits: Kabuto

DealHub.io, an Austin-based platform that helps businesses manage the entire process of their sales engagements, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Israel Growth Partners, with participation from existing investor Cornerstone Venture Partners. This brings DealHub’s total funding to $24.5 million.

The company describes itself as a ‘revenue amplification’ platform (or ‘RevAmp,’ as DealHub likes to call it) that represents the next generation of existing sales and revenue operations tools. It’s meant to give businesses a more complete view of buyers and their intent, and streamline the sales processes from proposal to pricing quotes, subscription management and (electronic) signatures.

“Yesterday’s siloed sales tools no longer cut it in the new Work from Anywhere era,” said Eyal Elbahary, CEO & Co-founder of DealHub.io. “Sales has undergone the largest disruption it has ever seen. Not only have sales teams needed to adapt to more sophisticated and informed buyers, but remote selling and digital transformation have compelled them to evolve the traditional sales process into a unique human-to-human interaction.”

The platform integrates with virtually all of the standard CRM tools, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Freshworks, as well as e-signature platforms like DocuSign.

The company didn’t share any revenue data, but it notes that the new funding round follows “continued multi-year hyper-growth.” In part, the company argues, demand for its platform has been driven by sales teams that need new tools, given that they — for the most part — can’t travel to meet their (potential) customers face-to-face.

“Revenue leaders need the agility to keep pace with today’s fast and ever-changing business environment. They cannot afford to be restrained by rigid and costly to implement tools to manage their sales processes,” said Uri Erde, General Partner at Israel Growth Partners. “RevAmp provides a simple to operate, intuitive, no-code solution that makes it possible for sales organizations to continuously adapt to the modern sales ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides sales leaders the visibility and insights they need to manage and consistently accelerate revenue growth. We’re excited to back the innovation DealHub is bringing to the world of revenue operations and help fuel its growth.”

DHL today announced that it will be expanding an ongoing partnership with Locus Robotics. Last year, the logistics giant announced plans to deploy 1,000 of the Massachusetts-based startup’s robots. The number is effectively doubling to 2,000 by 2022 — a deal that would make DHL Locus’ largest customer by a wide margin.

The two have been piloting robotics together since 2021, but interest in automation has picked up significantly during the pandemic. The reasons are myriad, but among them are the fact that robots can help keep things running amid a shutdown and are less likely to serve as a potential vector during a global pandemic.

DHL’s Global Supply Chain COO/CIO Markus Voss breaks down the figures accordingly:

So far, more than 500 assisted picking robots are already in industrial use in our warehouses in the USA, Europe and the UK. By the end of 2021, another 500 robots are to be added in a total of more than 20 locations. The collaborative picking technology has clearly proven its effectiveness and reliability in modern warehousing. More locations have already been identified with concrete implementation roadmaps for the remaining robots, which we will deploy in 2022. However, the overall potential for assisted picking robots in our DHL warehouses is much bigger, so we are confident that we will meet the targets we have set ourselves together with Locus Robotics.

Locus is one of several DHL robotics partners. In late 2018, the company announced a planned $300 million investment in the category, and as of last year, it said it had deployed more than 200,000 robots in warehouses across the U.S. It’s a figure that rivals — or event bests — that of Amazon’s robotics efforts.

In addition to these deals, Locus has seemingly had little issue shoring up cash support. In February, it announced a $150 million Series E that valued the company at $1 billion.

London-based Divido, a whitelabel platform for retail finance that integrates with ecommerce platforms (but can also support omni-channel) so retailers can offer consumers a ‘buy now, pay later’ option at the point of sale, has bagged a $30M Series B to fund international expansion.

The funding round is led by global banks HSBC and ING, with participation from Sony Innovation Fund by IGV*, SBI Investment, OCS, Global Brain and DG Daiwa Ventures along with existing investors DN Capital, Dawn Capital, IQ Capital and Amex Ventures.

The Series B follows a $15M Series A back in 2018 — when the fintech product was available in a handful of European markets and the U.S., with a goal of launching in 10 more countries by the end of 2019.

Evidently, that anticipated rapid-fire international expansion didn’t exactly pan out as planned, as Divido is only operating in ten markets across two continents now — a little under two years later. But, flush with Series B funding, it says it’s looking to fuel the pace of its international push.

The 2014-founded startup operates a marketplace model where lenders compete to offer the most suitable credit line to consumers to grease purchases — partnering with businesses such as banks, retailers and payment partners so they can offer a ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ to their users at the point of sale.

Divido claims its product leads to up to 20%-40% more sales for retailers — and it says it has more than 1,000 clients and operators at this stage (a metric it was also reporting in September 2018).

Its pitch is that by partnering with multiple lenders it can offer higher acceptance rates and lower fees to consumers so they have greater choice to spread payment for larger purchases. It also means it doesn’t need a banking licence itself, so can (in theory) scale faster into more markets.

Credit suitability is also assessed by the lenders on its platform, not by Divido itself.

The pandemic has clearly put pressure on many consumers’ personal finances which is likely to be driving more demand for alternative options to credit cards to spread purchase costs. Although the move toward diversifying ‘pay later’ options long pre-dates COVID-19 — via startups like Klarna and the scores that have sprung up in its wake.

Commenting on the Series B in a statement, Christer Holloman, founder and CEO, said: “The retail finance market is in a period of exponential growth, expected to hit $2.5 trillion next year. At Divido, we have created a global standard for banks, retailers and payment partners to connect seamlessly to offer ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ to consumers. It is hugely exciting to have this round led by global clients, which is testament to the strength of our product and the strategic impact we deliver.”

In another supporting statement, HSBC’s Catherine Zhou, its global head of venture, digital innovation and partnerships, said: “There is clear demand for retail finance across the globe, both from customers and merchants. The Divido platform enables lenders to serve customers in this area with a compelling, well-managed proposition.”

While Jan Willem Nieuwenhuize, MD of ING Ventures, added: “ING is focusing our innovation efforts around defined value spaces. Divido aligns with our lending value space and has a strong strategic fit with ING’s consumer finance business. This is an exciting and rapidly growing market that is constantly evolving and accelerating following Covid. We see Divido as an innovator at the very forefront of the market, so perfectly fits the profile for the dynamic, disruptive companies we choose to partner with.”